The salt weighers of Korralejo say the dust mephit is a thief. The parish almanac, which gives it half a page, says it is a draft with opinions. Both have swept up after it for generations and neither has settled the matter, so in the dry month I take a room above the weighing shed on the Bocaina road. I bring a stub of chalk, a cooper's rule and a saucer of water for the sill.
The sign comes at midafternoon with the shutters closed. The lamp flame leans toward the wall though nothing stirs the air. Then a ticking on the floorboards, like rice thrown one grain at a time. A gray haze lifts from the corner at the height of a table and thickens, and it assembles itself: a squat body of packed grit, a face like a cracked clay pan, eyes the dull yellow of candle wax, and two stubby wings that shed powder with every beat. It lands on the scale beam and the pans tip. When it hops to the floor I chalk the doorpost at the crown of its head. Later I measure from the boards to the mark with the cooper's rule: fourteen inches.
It does not touch the salt. It eats the dry mortar from between the wall stones, a crumb at a time, with the attention of a man at his dinner. When it notices me it coughs. The cloud is fine as flour and fills both eyes at once. I am blind for a minute, weeping gray streaks down my face, and I hear the shutter latch lift, though I was the one who set it. When I can see, the window stands open and a ribbon of powder runs across the floor to the sill.
Osvaldo Brito, who runs the shed, throws a dipper of brine across the boards each noon and says it only comes for dry corners. No one here sweeps its dust toward the door, because dust pushed out returns carrying a grudge. They sweep it toward the hearth. The ribbon on the floor is already spoken for. A dust-picker from Korralejo, a trade that exists only because of this creature, arrives within the hour with a lidded tin and a soft brush. The powder never clumps, and scribes in the lowlands pay well for it as blotting sand. She lifts the track in four strokes and leaves the floor clean. On the sill, the saucer holds a gray skin, flat as paper, with a single print pressed in it the size of a thumbnail.
- Classification
- Minor elemental of dust and wind
- Habitat
- Dry sheds, kilns, and salt pans
- Danger
- Low
- Size
- 14 inches tall, 20-inch wingspan
- Activity
- Diurnal
- Realm
- Elemental planes of dust and wind
- Binomial
- Pulvillus tussiens
- Diet
- Dry mortar, chalk, and loose grit
- Temperament
- Sly, petty, quick to cough